February 15, 04:45 PM 
514 Chai Chee Lane 03-16, Singapore 469029 Update, Feb. 16, 12.05am: The Ministry of Finance has been alerted about this tender/ quote document. They said they will be looking into the matter. Read more here.
The Government Electronic Business (GeBIZ) portal is like a business centre where vendors and suppliers of all stripes that want to make a buck off the state can go there and look for potential gigs, bid for them, and generally, conduct e-commerce with the Singapore Government.
All you need to log in and check it out is to have a business registration number registered with GeBIZ, and of course, your SingPass login details.
Which is why the following document that supposedly originated from GeBIZ deserves attention.
In one of the documents, most likely an Invitation-to-Quote or Tender document, one of the "Important Notes" for the vendor putting in a quote or tender, is to be able to provide design work that allows the client to make "UNLIMITED CHANGES", capitalised and in bold, as highlighted by this Facebook post by Kelley Cheng:
Multiple'>
Posted by Kelley Cheng on Sunday, February 14, 2016
It is not known from which ministry, agency or statutory board this originated from because it was not stated.
Now, what "Unlimited Changes" mean, in effect, is: The client procuring the services is expecting the vendor to not only be at the beck and call of the paying customer (i.e. the ministry, stat board, agency), but that the vendor must also accede to unlimited demands for new ideas, regardless of magnitude, at a fixed price and to have them turned in within an unrealistic response time.
This is so as it has been helpfully stated that the turnaround time is in one to two working days. And the screenshots of the document shows there is evidence of multiple demands for this sort of unlimited changes super service.
So what does this really mean? Basically, it reeks of a certain kind of mentality that gives short shrift to the work of creative types, who are expected to do things fast and churn intangible ideas out from thin air on demand.
It is an entitlement mentality that undermines the tediousness of the cognitive work required to come up with fresh ideas -- or worse, multiple iterations of one thing.
But to demand changes for creative work without commensurate remuneration will then be no different from not getting paid for work done and hours put in.
And quite a lot of times, the clients disagreeing with the design don't even know what they want, just what they don't want.
Plus, it discounts the talent and ability of creative types who had to undergo the requisite number of years of training, sweating and building a repertoire of usable, executable ideas in appreciable forms.
At the end of the day, for the lack of a better cliche, design work is still work done by people, who have bills to pay and mouths to feed, and constitutes as a form of labour. It is not exactly like engineering. Or manufacturing. Or some multi-faceted fandango.
Although it can be some times.
It is still labour. It is production. And there is no such thing as "UNLIMITED CHANGES". Not in bold. And certainly not capitalised.
Otherwise, the ministry, stat board or agency should have labelled their GeBIZ document as Invitation-to-Be-A-Slave.
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